Get The Point?

Woodblock

Share

Sunday, March 25, 2012

Dinyar Patel, a former APP research assistant is a Ph.D. candidate in history at Harvard University, currently working on a dissertation on Dadabhai Naoroji and early Indian nationalism. Below is the first of a four-part series for the New York Times blog on India called India Ink.

March 20, 2012, 7:04 am

In India, History Literally Rots Away

Nations such as
Russia and China destroyed historical documents and artifacts in fits of
revolutionary zeal. India has taken a much easier route: it has allowed
many priceless papers and other items to slowly disintegrate in, or be
stolen from, institutions starved of funding, bereft of proper
facilities and trained staff, and lacking proper security.

“They are, to say the least, appalling,” said Mushirul Hasan, who recently became director general of the National Archives of India,
in assessing Indian archives and libraries. In 2004, for example, items
in Rabindranath Tagore’s collection, including his 1913 Nobel Prize for
literature, were pilfered from Vishva Bharati University while security guards were supposedly watching an India-Pakistan cricket match.

The deplorable state of many collections
is an open secret amongst scholars but, due to fears of institutional
retribution, many refuse to publicly draw attention to the destruction
being committed.
There are many reasons for the woeful state of Indian archives and libraries.

“Archives
are the lowest priority for any government,” said historian Ramachandra
Guha. “They are staffed by government officials on punishment postings
rather than trained professionals.” Furthermore, many institutions are
housed in substandard structures. Open or broken windows are common,
exposing historical documents to humidity and boiling hot temperatures,
while allowing in the elements, insects, and the occasional animal. In
the fall of 2010, several scholars were startled to find a monkey
wandering through the research room of the National Archives. Termites
and bookworms also have gutted the holdings of many institutions.

The
damage has been significant. At the National Archives, letters penned
by Mohandas K. Gandhi, B.R. Ambedkar, Gopalkrishna Gokhale, and other
eminent Indian nationalists have suffered from exposure to humid
weather, staff negligence and mishandling, and improper preservation
methods. Many government records for the 19th and 20th centuries are
untraceable. In the words of one of the most senior historians of Indian
political history, S.R. Mehrotra, the National Library of India in Kolkata—India’s equivalent of the Library of Congress—is “a national disgrace.”

“Their
books are turning into dust,” he said. Archives and libraries have also
suffered from political controversy. In 2009, more than 50 Indian
historians wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, accusing the director
of Delhi’s prestigious Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, who was supposedly well-connected to the Congress Party, of trapping the institution “in a culture of apathy and mediocrity.”

Mr. Hasan and his staff have been
working diligently to reverse decades of damage at the National
Archives. The Nehru Library has recently installed a new director. But
other institutions have not been as lucky. “The real tragedy is at the
state and local archives,” Mr. Guha said.

A number of scholars
interviewed singled out the West Bengal State Archives in Kolkata as
suffering from especially appalling conditions. According to one
historian who asked not to be identified, at least one of the archives’
branches is “dust-covered and fungus-ridden.” He added, “It is literally
a health risk to work here,” noting that the archives’ only
firefighting equipment — a collection of buckets — was filled with
garbage.

Alexander Lee, a doctoral candidate in political science
at Stanford University, estimates that white ants, the term used in
India for termites, have destroyed about 10 percent of the files at the
Kolkata archives. Staff relations have been another sore point. In late
2008, archival staff went on a one-month strike after a scholar from an
Ivy League institution made a routine request for document retrieval.
The
West Bengal State Archives is currently without a permanent director,
but its temporary director, who assumed office six months ago,
acknowledged in an interview that certain problems and “pandemonium
conditions” exist. He also noted that he has submitted a detailed report
to his superiors in the state government, calling for wholesale
modernization of facilities.

If there are legions of horror
stories, there are also now a few rays of hope. The National Archives
has embarked on an ambitious program of expansion and modernization.
Other institutions, both private and public, have started similar
projects.

The Tokyo Diplomat provides a snappy, weekly roundup
of news relevant to Tokyo’s foreign policy community. To find out more about
this subscription service contact the Editor, Mr Michael Penn at the Shingetsu News Agency in Tokyo.
He is the author of the piece below.

March 11 of this year has witnessed a tsunami of its own—a
tsunami of news coverage of the anniversary. This entire week international
news about Japan has been flooded with all kinds of stories about the disaster.
The larger news organizations really geared up for this event and produced a
number of very good reports which clearly had been in preparation for weeks or
months.

It would be futile and just a bit repetitive to give an
account here of rebuilding efforts in Rikuzen-Takata or the story of a family
still suffering from the losses of that day. We recommend that you read some of
the stories that are out there in the mainstream press, because in this case
the international media is doing an excellent job.

What we want to do here is to play out a little thought
experiment: How would Japan be different today had the 9.0 earthquake off the
coast of Tohoku not occurred? Would this nation be radically different?

Needless to say, the lives of many people in the prefectures
of Iwate, Miyagi, and especially Fukushima would certainly be quite different.
About 20,000 more people would still be living and roughly a quarter of a
million would be back in their own homes. Many of those regions would still be
relatively poor and facing economic struggles, but their overall situation
would obviously be much better than it is now.

At the national level, energy policy is the area that would
be strikingly different. The national plan called for a massive expansion of
nuclear power from 30% of the nation’s energy to 50% in the decades ahead. This
plan had high-level political support in both the Democratic Party of Japan and
the Liberal Democratic Party, and there were few effective forces countering
them. The anti-nuclear groups were more marginal than they are today, and the
mainstream was mostly indifferent. The biggest challenge was likely to come
from local communities that didn’t want new nuclear plants to be sited in their
immediate neighborhoods.

The struggle over nuclear power is ongoing, but almost no
one argues in favor of expanding it beyond the March 11, 2011, level any more.
Even the more conservative views now acknowledge that Japan’s reliance on
nuclear power needs to be reduced below the levels of a year ago and that
renewable energy needs to be pursued more keenly. Most of the arguments now are
about speed and degree, not basic direction.

But what about Japanese politics? Have they been changed in
any important way by the multiple tragedies of March 11?

We tend to think not.

When the disaster struck, Prime Minister Naoto Kan was on
the ropes, and quite possibly within days of resigning. His administration’s
star foreign minister, Seiji Maehara, had just resigned for accepting campaign
contributions from a Korean national he had known in his youth. Another
lawmaker who was a close ally of Kan had attended a conference in South Korea
which demanded that Japan give up its territorial claims to Dokdo (Takeshima).
Indeed, the story had just broken that Kan himself had received illegal
donations from non-Japanese nationals. While the whole issue was basically a
triviality whipped up into a national scandal by Japan’s far right and the
media, the campaign was working and appeared to be on the verge of toppling Kan’s
shaky government. The prime minister was in the Diet getting pounded by the
opposition when the earthquake struck.

So the life of the Kan administration was extended from
March to September, and Kan himself found a political cause (denuclearization)
that had previously escaped him.

Would Yoshihiko Noda be prime minister today had there been
no earthquake and tsunami? Possibly. He would have been a major contender had
Kan been forced to resign over the campaign finance scandal in March. Maehara
couldn’t have run and very well may have thrown his support to Noda. The Ozawa
group’s situation was not dramatically altered between March and September, so
Noda could very well have been the man to rise at that time too.

There’s no reason to think that the balance of power between
the parties would be much different either. No one has really seen their
political stock rise dramatically due to the March 11 tragedy—except arguably
the Emperor Akihito and the Self-Defense Forces which both played positive roles.
By the same token, no major political figure saw their career ruined by the
disaster either. For most people in the political world, it made no significant
difference to the trajectory of their personal fortunes.

Clearly, the anti-nuclear movement became more significant
in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns, but they still remain on the
edges of the mainstream political world and are not united behind any of the
existing political parties.

We also hear much about how the trust of the Japanese people
in their leaders has been eroded by gross mismanagement by the authorities.
However, it remains unclear if this signifies very much. Whatever distrust that
ordinary Japanese citizens may feel, when it comes to action there is very
little to behold. Only a handful takes part in protest movements and there is
little evidence that people are organizing themselves in any fashion that will
have a meaningful effect on government policy. Indeed, a very common reaction
is to complain about a lack of leadership in one breath and then shrug that “it
can’t be helped” in the next. No “Arab Spring” is imminent in this nation.

In any case, were bureaucrats and the political class highly
regarded before March 11? The handling of the tragedy has only exacerbated old
trends rather than produced entirely new factors—outside of the aforementioned
changes in energy policy, which did take an unexpected U-turn.

Some political force is eventually going to capitalize on
the popular discontent and be swept into power. The most obvious candidate at
present is Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto, although we frankly doubt if he is
really the answer to Japan’s problems.

However, all of this is something that has been building for
decades and is not a product of March 11. For the past several election cycles,
the Japanese people have continued to “throw the bums out” and give electoral
victories to opposition parties. The August 2009 general election in which 54
years of Liberal Democratic Party rule was terminated was supposed to herald
the new dawn, but the Democratic Party of Japan has—to say the least—failed to
live up to its promises, which is a judgment that most lawmakers inside the
ruling party freely admit. If a fresh general election is held soon, there is
no reason to believe that the situation will radically improve. The
dysfunctional system seems to have at least a few more years in it.

Surveying the year that has passed, one is therefore struck
with the sense of how little things have changed from the perspective of Japanese
politics and government institutions. Yes, there is a lot of discontent in
Japan and a political turning point will eventually come. We can now safely
say, however, that the March 11, 2011, disaster may one day be counted as a
contributing factor to that change, but it does not represent the political
turning point itself.

This essay first appeared in the Tokyo Diplomat March 12, 2012 and then in the Asia Policy Calendar for APP members on March 18th.

This coming week in Washington is all about American competitiveness and manufacturing. The focus is on China, as opposed to Japan as it was 20 years ago.

In December 2011, the Council on Competitiveness at its National Manufacturing Competitiveness Summit announced a National Manufacturing Strategy. The Strategy -Make: An American Manufacturing Movement - which engaged hundreds of private and public sector leaders in two years of work and numerous dialogues across the country - maps how the United States can lead the world in 21st century, advanced manufacturing that will be at the heart of the nation's long-term productivity and prosperity.

On March 9th, President Obama announced a new proposal for a National Network for Manufacturing Innovation, to build a network of up to fifteen Institutes for
Manufacturing Innovation around the country, serving as regional hubs of
manufacturing excellence that will help to make manufacturers more
competitive and encourage investment in the United States. The
President’s Budget proposes a $1 billion investment to create this new
National Network for Manufacturing Innovation.

CAN AMERICA RESTORE ITS COMPETITIVE EDGE?3/28, 9:30-11:00am, Washington, DC. Sponsor: National Conversation at Woodrow Wilson Center. Speakers: The Honorable Jane Harman—President, Director and CEO, WWC; Norm Augustine, former CEO, Lockheed-Martin, Chair of the National Academies Gathering Storm Committee, author of Rising Above the Gathering Storm; John Engler, former Governor of Michigan, former President of the National Association of Manufacturers, President of the Business Roundtable; Paul Vallas, former Superintendent of the Recovery School District in Louisiana, former CEO of Chicago Public Schools and the School District of Philadelphia; Moderator: David Wessel, Chief Economic Correspondent, Wall Street Journal.

Saturday, March 10, 2012

If you view Mayor of Nagoya Takashi Kawamura, who denied the atrocities of the Rape of Nanking in
front of a visiting Chinese delegation, as an aberration, you might want to
remember that as a DPJ Dietmember he was one of the over 60 signatories of the
infamous June 14, 2007 “The Facts” ad in the Washington Post condemning the Comfort Women, girls and women who were sex slaves trafficked to Imperial Japan's military, as lying whores. He was a member of a
number of Diet leagues to examine the truth about Nanking and other historical
issues, as was Aki Nagashima, who is
now an important foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Noda.

Jin Matsubara,
who is Minister for the Abduction Issue and Chairman of the National Public
Safety Commission Minister of State for Consumer Affairs and Food Safety in the Noda Cabinet
was also a signatory of “The Facts” ad. He was a founder of one of the Diet Leagues examining Nanking. Further, Composer Koichi Sugiyama, one of the main funders and signatories for
“The Facts” ad, composed an election campaign song for Matsubara.

Hideo Jinpu, who is now Parliamentary Secretary
of Defense in the Noda Cabinet was also a signatory of “The Facts” ad.

For those of you less satisfied by the nihonjin descriptions given by Ms. Hideki Kato in her US presentations on haiku, we suggest you read the beautiful essay on Matsuo Bashō, the most famous Japanese haiku poet, by Jane Hirshfield, Heart of Haiku. It is available through Kindle for 99 cents.

Packed with original translations, The Heart of Haiku is an elegant and reverent exploration of an itinerant artist who "wanted to renovate human vision by putting what he saw into a bare handful of mostly ordinary words, and… to renovate language by what he asked it to see."

AM
07:53 Parliament
07:55 A Joint Meeting of the Council on Measures for Society with Decreasing Birthrate and the Council on the New System for Children and Child-rearing
08:17 Ministerial Meeting
08:39 Office of PM
09:58 Mr. Teruhiko Masuko, DPJ Upper House member; Mr. Kenya Akiba, LDB Lower House member; and Mr. Shigeyuki Tomita, New Koemei Lower House member
09:20 Mr. Akiba and Mr. Tomita leave
09:33 Mr. Masuko leaves
09:34 Mr. Edano, Minister of Economy, Trade, and Industry; Mr. Adachi, Vice-Minister of Economy, Trade, and Industry; Mr. Takahara, Director-General, Agency for Natural resources and Energy
09:51 Mr. Makoto Iokibe, Chair of the Reconstruction Design Council in Response to the Great East Japan Earthquake; Mr. Takashi Mikuriya, Vice Chair; Mr. Minehisa, Secretary General of the Secretariat of the Reconstruction Headquarters
11:13 Mr. Maehara, chairperson of DPJ Policy Research Council

PM
12:01 The APCAC 2012 U.S.-Asia Business Summit at hotel “The Prince Park Tower Tokyo”, Shibakoen, Tokyo
12:26 Office of PM
12:32 Mr. Hosono, Minister of State for the Nuclear Power Policy and Administration
01:10 Mr. Hosono leaves
02:47 Mr. Yoshiki Yamaura and Mr. Hitsuharu Miyagawa, new and old Supreme Court judges
03:21 Mr. Kitamura, Head of Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office
03:59 Mr. Saito, Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary; and Mr. Nagashima, Special Advisor to PM
04:33 Mr. Tarutoko, DPJ Acting Secretary General
05:09 Mr. Tezuka, Special Advisor to PM
05:17 The Council on National Strategy and Policy
06:46 The council adjourned
07:08 Dinner with Mr. Tezuka, Special Advisor to PM; and Ms. Renho, DPJ Upper House member, at a Japanese restaurant “Matsuyama”, Ginza, Tokyo
10:05 Everyone leaves
10:16 Residence of PM

March 3, 2012 (SAT)

AM
11:57 Luch with Mr. Nobuaki Koga, President of Japanese Trade Union Confederation, at a Japanese restaurant “Suiren”, The Capitol Hotel Tokyu

...the self-defense forces have not benefitted from their new levels of public support and legitimacy. Few new equipment requests were inserted into the FY2012 budget request, and in the end, the defense budget was cut again. The SDF is not benefitting in any direct way from its performance after March 11. Likewise, neither is the alliance in any better shape than it was beforehand. In fact, there are more questions than ever about basing issues in particular. In short—and in the near term—there does not seem to have been a particularly salutary effect on either the SDF or the alliance since March 11.

Fukushima in review: A complex disaster, a disastrous response by Yoichi Funabashi and Kay Kitazawa at Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation (RJIF), a think tank created last year and funded by individuals and businesses. The conclusion of the report in English can be found on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. It delves into the actions taken by Tepco, the utility that owns and operates the Fukushima Daiichi plant, as well as the role of the government and nuclear regulators. Summary.

Had the plant’s owner, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), and Japan’s regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA), followed international best practices and standards, it is conceivable that they would have predicted the possibility of the plant being struck by a massive tsunami. The plant would have withstood the tsunami had its design previously been upgraded in accordance with state-of-the-art safety approaches. The methods used by TEPCO and NISA to assess the risk from tsunamis lagged behind international standards in at least three important respects.

One could get the impression from that the public is (as usual) ready for change after six months of the same Prime Minister. In a Mainichi Shimbun poll of 3-4 March, approval of the Noda Cabinet fell to 28%. Unsurprisingly, in the same poll, the consumption tax increase remains deeply unpopular with 58% disapproving of the two-stage increase, and with 79% skeptical that such an increase would stabilize pension and other social security policies. Yet Yoshihiko Noda has surprising resources to hold on as Prime Minister at the head of yet another configuration of the diverse groups within its ranks. If the question of raising the consumption tax can be settled—then Noda may have a lot more time as Prime Minister as his predecessors.

The latest whiff of change in Nagata-cho was the “rumored” meeting on February 25 between Prime Minister Noda and the LDP’s President Sadakazu Tanigaki. This set free speculation about the chances for a grand coalition. It is one possible outcome of the struggle to raise the consumption tax, and the one that would make the most sense if political parties were to seek coalition partners on the basis of policy agreements. One putative reason for the grand coalition is the opposition of parts of the DPJ and the LDP to Ichiro Ozawa, over the issue of the consumption tax in particular but over the relationship between parties and the bureaucracy and other deeper positions.

Despite the fireworks over the consumption tax, there is much less to the conflict inside the DPJ over Ozawa than meets the eye. First, Noda’s cabinet relies on senior politicians close to Ozawa to steer important policy, including even fiscal policy. Second, Ozawa’s ongoing problems in the political finance scandal involving his political fundraising organization make the duration of his political career uncertain. Third, Ozawa’s group has quietly folded in every other confrontation including the election of PM Noda in exchange for positions of responsibility. The high likelihood of losing any general election resulting from open revolt in the DPJ make them poor material for forcing a confrontation.

A grand coalition would have the advantage of receiving wide public support. Even in the early 1980s, when the LDP and JSP were 180 degrees apart on key policy issues, the public supported a grand coalition as the most preferred option in several NHK public opinion surveys. The condition of floating voters has also strengthened, if anything, since the advent of DPJ government in 2009.

At the same time, Noda is not focused on public opinion but rather on maintaining elite coalitions. The problem is that that while this shores up Noda’s standing with the various parts of the DPJ, the LDP, and with the Ministry of Finance, and foreign investors, the distance from the public is growing rather than shrinking.

As long as Noda’s pledge of “no side” politics is working in practice as well as a rhetorical device at the elite level, therefore, general public dissatisfaction can be expected to continue all the way up to the next election.

Unfortunately for Noda, this prospect of rising public dissatisfaction also raises the possibility of challengers outside the party system entirely…such as the One Osaka movement of the major of Osaka, Toru Hashimoto. After all, untested leaders from outside of politics-as-usual are the most appealing once all parties have lost their importance to the voters.

Madoka Mayazumi, one of Japan's leading contemporary haiku poets, will elucidate what the haiku form reveals about the values that permeate Japan's culture. For more information see her, Haiku: The Heart of Japan in 17 Syllables

About Us

APP is a Washington research center studying the U.S. policy relationship with Northeast Asia. We provide factual context and informed insight on Asian science, finance, politics, security, history, and public policy.